Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene


Autoria(s): Sala, Nohemi; Arsuaga, Juan Luis; Pantoja-Pérez, Ana; Pablos, Adrián; Martínez, Ignacio; Quam, Rolf M.; Gómez Olivencia, Asier; Bermúdez de Castro, José María; Carbonell, Eudald
Data(s)

15/04/2016

15/04/2016

27/05/2015

Resumo

Evidence of interpersonal violence has been documented previously in Pleistocene members of the genus Homo, but only very rarely has this been posited as the possible manner of death. Here we report the earliest evidence of lethal interpersonal violence in the hominin fossil record. Cranium 17 recovered from the Sima de los Huesos Middle Pleistocene site shows two clear perimortem depression fractures on the frontal bone, interpreted as being produced by two episodes of localized blunt force trauma. The type of injuries, their location, the strong similarity of the fractures in shape and size, and the different orientations and implied trajectories of the two fractures suggest they were produced with the same object in face-to-face interpersonal conflict. Given that either of the two traumatic events was likely lethal, the presence of multiple blows implies an intention to kill. This finding shows that the lethal interpersonal violence is an ancient human behavior and has important implications for the accumulation of bodies at the site, supporting an anthropic origin.

Identificador

PLOS ONE 10(5) 2015 : (2015) // Article ID e0126589

1932-6203

http://hdl.handle.net/10810/17921

10.1371/journal.pone.0126589

Idioma(s)

eng

Publicador

Public Library Science

Relação

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0126589#abstract0

Direitos

© 2015 Sala et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Palavras-Chave #blunt head trauma #spain hominin sample #los huesos atapuerca #breakage patterns #postmortem interval #fracture patterns #skull fractures #bone-fractures #force-trauma #sima
Tipo

info:eu-repo/semantics/article